November 15, 2005

Evangelical scholars to tackle issues raised by ‘da Vinci Code’ - (BP):

“Christianity in the Early Centuries” will be the theme of the Evangelical Theological Society’s annual meeting Nov. 16-18 in Valley Forge, Pa. Society leaders chose the topic to refute what Edwin Yamauchi, the conference’s program chair, called “disinformation” about exactly how the church came to be.

Sounds like a pretty standard group of debunkers getting together. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

David Westheimer, 1917-2005 | Ann Arbor District Library

David Westheimer, author of Von Ryan’s Express (1964), died yesterday in Los Angeles.

The former WWII POW and later editor of the former Houston Post newspaper, used his wartime experience to pen Von Ryan’s Express which was made into a movie by the same name a year later, and starred Frank Sinatra and Trevor Howard. In 1980, Westheimer wrote the sequel, Van Ryan’s Return.

Westheimer also wrote My Sweet Charlie (1965), which became a Broadway play in 1966 and which netted Patty Duke an Emmy for the TV adaptation in 1970.

David Westheimer was 88.

The book is darned good, and the movie is true to it. This is a death to be mourned.

Update: my trusty Ann Arbor District Library still had its first edition of the 1964 book. I re-read it this weekend. It is still a cracking good story with well constructed characters in a compelling situation. Gee, with all the cruddy Hollywood movies that they remake, why don’t they remake Von Ryan’s Express? It’s a natural.

The novel has aged well. There are some aspects of the story I didn’t notice on first reading that stood out more this time. For example, to make his escape from the prison train, Ryan has to kill twelve guards with his bare hands. That’s a lot of killing, and it shakes him … which is absolutely realistic.

One of Ryan’s key aides is the camp padre, who winds up being intimately involved in the death of German soldiers who confided in him in the confessional. Ryan forces him to make a choice between his uniform as a soldier and his uniform as a chaplain. A great side part for an accomplished actor!

icTeesside - How super-owl has been lying doggo:

The world’s biggest owl is secretly and successfully breeding in England. Knee-high to a human, with a two-metre wingspan and weighing in at four kilos, the eagle owl is returning after hundreds of years of absence.

As a result of Voldemort’s defeat in the events narrated in Harry Potter Book Seven?

JKR is running a year or two behind the real world, yes?

Mini-Microsoft: A Disruptive Defrag for Microsoft:

Now then, regarding this insight:

Another simple tool I’ve used involves attracting developers to use common physical workspaces to naturally catalyze ad hoc face-time between those who need to coordinate, rather than relying solely upon meetings and streams of email and document reviews for such interaction.

Whoa-ho-ho, there, Tex, hold on there! I’m lining up like the next guy to kill off meetings and email threads and reviews, but I escaped the cube-farm to come to Microsoft. A door and free cola sealed the deal for me. I’d much rather show up at 9am for the daily scrum meeting and have to hold my tongue than go back to the days of being in a shared space. I guess if we did implement that environment I would personally help realize my vision of a smaller Microsoft by jumping to some local startup.

This was the most genuine moment of emotion in Mini-Microsoft’s post. This is a bad sign.

If doors make teams less effective, should doors be an entitlement?

Don’t get me wrong. I love having an office with a door. There is considerable research that it makes individual programmers more productive (see Steve McConnell’s RAPID DEVELOPMENT for sources). But maturity means taking a close look at whether the psychic goods of the individual are more important than the psychic goods of the team.

Humans ate giant lemurs to extinction:

Humans ate giant lemurs to extinction

Madagascar’s first inhabitants probably hunted the island’s largest animals to extinction according to research published in the November issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

…Despite its current biological wealth, Madagascar is relatively impoverished when compared to flora and fauna that existed on the island before the arrival of humans 2000 years ago. Roaming the island were gorilla-sized lemurs, monstrous tortoises, pygmy hippos, and the enormous Elephant bird (Aephornis maximus) that stood ten feet (3m) tall, weighed over 1100 pounds (500 kg), and laid an egg large enough to make an omelette to feed 150 people. All these species went extinct after man reached the island.

Sorry.

The problem with hand-wringing about historical extinction of megafauna is that it completely overlooks some basic truths.

1. To parents with children, giant carnivores are dangerous pests.
I would gladly kill every giant carnivore on the planet to save one child.
2. To parents with children, giant herbivores are attractive sources of nutrition. See Matthew 7:9.

Now we can afford to save and protect giant megafauna, and by all means we should do so. But to pretend that we should have done so hundreds or thousands of years ago simply flies in the face of fundamental realities of our nature as a pack-organized, omnivorous, mammalian primate.